Project Origin Stuff Originates

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What do we want from Monolith’s ropey-named sequel to F.E.A.R.? Apart from less full-stops, obviously. More outdoorsmanship, more personality, more shocks, a much wider variety of angry men, please.

New screenshots suggest big robots. Happy-time! But what does the latest trailer suggest? Clicky below to find out.

More heavy reliance on the little girl with long, black hair who’s like her of out of The Ring still being scary by rotating her head slowly and flickering in and out of existence. Wuh-oh. You’re gonna have to give Alma a lot more bite to make my stiff upper lip quiver, Monolith – though I’m sure the real frights are being kept under lock and key for now. Still, the scenes of outdoor apocalypse are pleasingly straight outta Sarah Connor’s nightmares, and the gibbering, evaporating madmen are pretty creepy.

There’s much more P.O. up on the brand new ‘community’ site for the game, including a fun couple of devblog videos (the first of which features a sequence of men giggling and naming their favourite FPS weapons of all time) and a haul of fruity-fresh screenshots.

The old visual cliche of a children’s playground shortly after a nuclear explosion is getting a bit old now. I want someone to bite the bullet and show a gutted old people’s home or bingo hall immediately after the bomb has dropped.

See, I’m not so excited about big robots. The introduction of the rocket-launching ones in FEAR signaled the beginning of the end of my enjoyment of that title. Maybe I just didn’t think about it properly or should have been more 1337, dude, but they got too hard. I have rather high hopes for Project Origin, though, so hopefully I can get a logical way of taking down high-powered enemies without resorting to OMFG RUN AND EMPTY MY WHOLE ARSENAL INTO HIS ARSENAL!!!!

FEAR is still my favorite game where you can shoot things.
No seriously. It has it all. Cool gunplay, a sort of tactical resource management beyond just ammo (Bullet-Time, Ammo and Greanades), great looks, clever AI, and some nice weapons. Plus, nothing beats the combination of the shotgun in close combat and slow motion. Stick it up their nostrils and whatch’em go boom.
Or something.
I couldn’t care less about the plot though. It’s all about cool set pieces, interesting fights and gorgeous looking gunplay.
That you’re basically playing through a blend of a nerds common movie library doesn’t make that much of a great story, but it’s still incredibly FUN to play.
So, yeah, as a HUGE fanboi of everything Monolith makes, I’m of course huegly looking forward to this.

I generally don’t find much in games scary, Alma included, I felt bad for her, though genocide doesn’t seem exactly proper for retribution. The ninjas freaked me out till I learned to use slow-mo on them and shoot them, rather than try and normal speed box them. The robots were very tough, though you usually had some time to prepare for their attack and could set up an elaborate trap and kill them off with 4-5 rockets. The ones in Extraction Point, were just insanely hard to kill and without the boosts to help me along, it just got painful.

Well with Alma there was some ambiguity in FEAR because of the fact your her child and she is seeking you in a fashion. In the expansion pack they touch on this a bit more as she helps you in one segment but part of her wants to kill you and another wants to save you.

Project Origin however has you playing some other character I heard so Alma could very much be an enemy.

Also count me an another huge Monolith fanboy I always loved their games but they seem to get so little attention from some quarters or even out-right animosity, could never figure why.

Reply to Taxman “Also count me an another huge Monolith fanboy I always loved their games but they seem to get so little attention from some quarters or even out-right animosity, could never figure why.”

Take your pick monotonous setting, monotonous enemies, the fact you can practicaly the gear change when it tries to be frightening, the bastardisation of the Ring, sudden difficulty spikes, fighting the same fight over and over again whilst repeating the same horror trick ad infinitum. Alma doesn’t just copy Sadako’s look and flickeryness but also the man made monster/tragic beast backstory. Like with Ringu this worked fine in F.E.A.R but has started to be stretched very thin. She’s pretty much lost all empathy and vulnerability by being a mardy bint.

Don’t get me wrong I really did enjoy the first F.E.A.R . Nailing what are essentialy S.W.A.T teams to walls with 5” bolts is pretty much illegal not to enjoy. Also, the sheer strangeness of some hallucinations sequences make an impression, shame the whole game had the same ammount of variety and immagination. Seeing as this is the same company that made NOLF and Shogu you can see what the old school Monolith fans are expecting.

What I always loved about FEAR was the *gameplay* and I was able to forgive the HALO Library-like level design and some tedious plotting because of that. I really enjoyed the combat in FEAR, running backwards and firing again and again against the armoured commandos… and the adrenaline rush when trying to defeat the invisininjas who were bloody dangerous to have hanging around.

Some of the spooky moments were well done and even though the gameplay switched down a couple of notches for the final level, I did like how it played out.

Are you guys kidding? Norton Mapes was probably the best character in the whole game. He is genuinely the only civilian character in an FPS that made me hate him so bad that I wanted to forget the mission and just toss him out a window. Everything from his constantly patronising tone down to his “RTFM” belt made him hate him with an utter passion. Most game antagonists didn’t tick me off as much as he did.

As a deliberately designed in-game character, he was a genius touch. It was also really funny when you saw a discarded cheetos packet lying on the floor, and that music cue played, and you just knew who was going to be around the next corner…